Eagles are lonely hunters who don't spend much time with other birds, are quite rare in numbers and only live in the wilderness. Robins however, are often seen near other birds, basically live everywhere and are also large in numbers. So mayhaps people choose Robin as the better disease spreader simply because Robin probably is the better disease spreader.
There are very many factors that may affect this kind of a test.. What do you think about the following?
If you were told that planktons had caught a disease, how likely would you think it would spread among other sea species? Now suppose fish had caught the disease?
Now, plankton definitely isn't the most obvious sea species, while fish is. Yet I dare suspect that people would select plankton as the better disease spreader simply because they are everywhere. I'm not certain though.
So, mayhaps, because people know how a disease spreads best among large populations, they tend to select a species which is large in numbers, or which they think to be large in numbers. Maybe people select the typical member of the group as the better disease spreader (when asked to choose between two), simply because such typical member is also likely one that people see often and hence they also believe it is great in numbers.
In essence, my point is: Maybe, when people are asked which one of two species of a given group are better disease spreaders, they select the one which is typical in the group of potential disease spreaders of species, and leave the one which is more atypical out.
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Consuming chemicals that have been tested is certainly an improvement on consuming chemicals that haven't been.
Consuming chemicals to make your brain work better seems to me to be a rather similar activity to overclocking a computer. Let's add more voltage. Let's pour liquid nitrogen into it. Perhaps it will go faster ! Perhaps it will, but will it still be working in 5 years time?
First of all, note just how crude these efforts are compared to the technological research undertaken by the companies that actually make microchips. The same is true of the brain - it can make dopamine and deliver at synapses - exact points of contact throughout the brain. Yet you see people discussing just adding more dopamine everywhere, and thinking that this is in some sense improving on nature in a clever way.
I have to mention a point against myself - which is that I do take general anaesthetics, which, while not an intelligence enhancer, is definitely an intelligence modifier for specific circumstances. However, turning brain function off is arguably simpler than trying to make it better.
It is possible, definitely, to improve human intelligence by combining it with a computer. So it's not the case that I'm against the idea that it's impossible to improve on the natural intelligence we all have - it obviously is.
What I'm pointing out is that all of these drug ideas are bound to be something that evolution has at some point tried out, and thrown away. And they are really unsophisticated ideas compared with those the brain has actually adopted.
Even the situation dependent argument isn't as strong as you might think - for example your brain has a lot of adaptations to cover the "unpleasant and potentially traumatic things" situation, for example - and these adaptations generally disagree with your view that you shouldn't remember them. It's probably the case that intelligence tests are a novel environment, however....
Well there could be many reasons why evolution has" thrown them out". Maybe they are harmful in the long term, maybe their use consumes precious energy, or maybe they just aren't "good enough" for evolution to have kept them. That is, maybe they just don't give any signifigant evolutionary advantage.
Evolution doesn't create perfect beings, it creates beings which are good enough to survive.